Pyramid Review

Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition

Written by Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook, and Skip Williams

300 pages and Demo CD-Rom; $19.95

(Editor's note: make sure you read this week's Random Thought Table for information about reviews of this product.)

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Consider the following statement: Gravity's Rainbow is a better book than
Hollywood Wives. It may be completely true, but it doesn't say much about
the quality of Gravity's Rainbow. By the same token, Dungeons and Dragons
3rd Edition is better than Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition.

Don't get me wrong. There's a lot to like about Dungeons and Dragons 3rd
Edition as seen in the Player's Handbook. The new artwork is gorgeous and
evocative, and in the 286 pages of the main rulebook there's a lot of
well-written and tightly-packed rules.

There are over 100 pages on character creation and another hundred-plus
pages are devoted to spell lists. Immediately after the table of contents,
the book begins telling you how to make a character. Six statistics are
rolled on 4d6, with the lowest die dropped and the numbers assigned as you
see fit. You choose a race, which will grant you certain abilities and
raise one statistic by two points and lower another by two points (unless
you play a half orc, in which case you get shafted by a +2 to strength and
a -2 to both intelligence and charisma). The half-orc is the only "new"
race, although it's really just a throwback to 1st . . .

This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.